At Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Now, Voyager, its presentation of mental illness and hope. “In the years since its release, the film has garnered a reputation as Davis’s best performance and a quintessential example of the women’s picture, a proto-feminist subgenre that took shape in 1930s Hollywood that made the interior lives of complex women its terrain. When I watched the 1942 film — which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year — for the first time as a teenager, it wasn’t the glamour or even the stirring romance that captured my imagination. It was the knotted story about Charlotte’s struggle with mental illness that I was drawn to because it offered something I hadn’t seen before or since in cinematic madwomen: hope.”
Categories: Notes